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by Miaou Jones (miaoujones)



Series: Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, & Maybe Love [1]
Category: South Park
Genre: Established Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Love Triangle, M/M, Troubled Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-26
Updated: 2011-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miaoujones/pseuds/Miaou%20Jones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight and a half years into his relationship with Kyle, Stan discovered he was the "other man" to Kyle's nine year secret relationship with Kenny. Now the three of them are living under one roof, which probably isn't the best option but, all things considered, it's the only one Stan can think of.</p>
            </blockquote>





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When he hears the back porch door slide open, Stan doesn't bother looking over. "Can't a man get a little privacy in his own home?"

"It's my home now, too," Kenny says lightly, with a grin Stan can only imagine.

"Fuck you." The words are out before Stan even knew they were coming; he bites down pointlessly, teeth closing on nothing but air.

"You want to hit me, dude?"

Stan's fingers tighten around the railing.

"I know you do," Kenny says. "Come on." In the reflection of the glass doors, Stan sees Kenny straighten and hold his hands behind his back, clasped at the wrists.

"I don't want to hit you." Stan keeps his voice low, nothing in it but the words themselves.

But Kenny hears something, anyhow. Or maybe he isn't even listening. Maybe he's just looking, because he is definitely looking; Stan feels the weight of the stare. "Yeah, you do," Kenny says. "Come on," he says again. "I won't hit back."

Stan pushes off the railing, takes the porch steps one at a time, slow and steady wins the race, keeps walking. Despite the clear lack of invitation, Kenny follows. Of course he does.

"Fuck off, Kenny."

"You'll feel better if you hit me," Kenny says. "I won't tell Kyle, you have my word." As they clear the side of the house, he adds, "Or is it that Kyle's the one you want to hit?"

They stop in the driveway.

"I don't want to hit anyone," Stan says quietly.

"You never wanted to hit anyone so bad in your life," Kenny says even more quietly. "Just look at your own hand. Look how fucking tight that fist is."

Stan looks. Unclenches his hand, re-clenches it. An empty gesture. Just so empty.

Past his hand, on the ground by his foot, is a tire iron, left lying about from work restoring the '67 GTO that has been sitting in the driveway for the past month and a half. Stan bends to wrap his fingers around the tool, the metal body cool and snug across his palm. He straightens, turns, and brings it down on the windshield. The glass cracks but doesn't shatter, so Stan targets the same point as he swings again. This blow sends the fracture running the length of the glass; the next one produces a spray of glass, the one after forces the windshield to collapse inwards entirely, sprawling across the front seats.

Adrenaline spikes through him as he connects with the sideview mirror, striking it off cleanly, sending it somewhere he neither knows nor cares. The spike spreads, sharp and hot and undiluted through him, racing through him, the pounding of his blood echoing the pounding of the tire iron as he crushes it, this fucking travesty of a vehicle, sitting obscenely in _his_ driveway, taking up _his_ space. Never mind that Stan rides a bicycle and has a bus pass, it's still HIS FUCKING DRIVEWAY. The pounding of his blood, his head, his heart is echoed by the pounding of his hands and feet as he shatters each window, smashes the taillights, kicks the tailpipe down and down until it twists, contorts, ruined even if it won't break. He pummels the body, scraping and scratching and bashing but it's still just the surface, so he reaches in through what remains of the driver's window to pop the hood, and he barely stops to look at it, the guts, the heart of the car; he starts ripping it out, prying out each cylinder, yanking out the spark plug, tearing out valves and pistons, rings and all, wrenching and slashing and severing, flinging parts off blindly, until there is nothing more to be ripped away.

When it's done, he lets gravity take the tire iron from his unclenched hand and leans against the outer wall of the garage, his face turned up to the night sky.

"You're bleeding."

Stan doesn't look down. "I know."

"Here."

He glances at the hand being held out to him, the antiseptic bandage from the emergency kit they keep in the garage curled up on the palm. He examines the wound on his inner forearm before pressing the leading edge of the bandage to it, unraveling the treated material just enough to cover the length and breadth of the worst cut, smoothing it down, the sting of the antibacterial agent already receding as he wraps another loop of bandage around. "Thanks."

When he finishes he leans back against the garage, but this time finds himself gazing down into scattered pieces of engine and broken metal and splays of glass.

"Stan."

Stan looks up to find Kenny standing with raised eyebrows by the small refrigerator they keep out here, holding up a beer. He nods, and Kenny reaches in to get a second bottle before coming over, popping the cap off the first and handing it to Stan.

They drink in silence. Stan turns his eyes to the stars again. "You know," he says between sips, "When we said 'til death do us part', this wasn't what I had in mind."

He hears a soft rustling as Kenny shifts. Then: "Did you just make a joke, dude?"

"Yeah."

"It didn't really—"

"I know," Stan tries to cut him off.

"Because, even though I have an unusual relationship with Death, I'm not actually him."

Stan doesn't say anything, and after a beat Kenny says, "It was pretty funny, though."

"You can laugh if you want," Stan says, but neither of them does.

Several swigs later, Kenny says, "Seriously, dude, you need to work on getting past this. I mean, if this is the way things are going to be, the way they are, you need to come to terms with it. It's not fair to anyone, including you, if you keep holding onto all these bad feelings."

Stan waits for all the words that rush his mind to settle before he carefully chooses the ones for his tongue. "You had nine years to build this, whatever 'this' is. The two of you had nine fucking years." His throat chokes off and he stops words in favor of restoring his breath.

"So, what—that means you get nine years to be angry?"

"I get as long as it takes," Stan says. He looks Kenny in the eye. "That's what he's giving me. So either you give me that, too, or you give me him."

Kenny doesn't say anything. He doesn't hold the gaze.

"That's what I thought." Stan takes another long pull, polishing off the bottle. He tosses it at the recycling bin but misses, and it lands with a soft thud in the grass. By the time Stan has picked it up and dropped it into the bin with a clink, Kenny has fetched them a second round.

"He offered to call it quits with me," Kenny points out after the first sips.

Stan knows this very well. He knows the offer was sincere, and he knows, too, that it is a promise destined to be broken. He has been through the implausibility of Kyle and Kenny staying away from each other; he has been over his belief with Kyle; he does not want to go through or over or around it again, and certainly not with Kenny.

"All he had to do was tell me, when we first hooked up in high school, that he was fooling around with you, too," Stan says instead.

"He was afraid you would have turned him away."

"I would have," Stan says.

Kenny looks at him hard. "You'd really prefer it had gone down like that? You'd give up all these years, everything that went with them? I know Kyle wouldn't." Quick hard breath, not laughter, something else. "He wouldn't trade his time with you for anything. Just like I wouldn't trade mine with Butters, even with how everything ended."

Stan looks back evenly. "Why don't you ask Butters what _he_ thinks? I'll see if he'd be okay with me giving you his new number, if you want to."

The quiet now is colder, emptier.

"I thought we were maybe having a moment here, Stan," Kenny says, still looking down.

"Close," Stan says.

After a minute, Kenny says, "I'll leave you alone then."

When he's gone, Stan slides down and sits amidst the constellations and ruins of the GTO.

Kyle finds him still sitting there. He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't ask if Stan is okay, doesn't ask anything about Kenny. He sits next to Stan and Stan lets him, even though he doesn't let Kyle touch the wound.


End file.
